psydii

I'm kind-of expecting/fearful that the Windows 10 ADK/WinPE boot images wont get an update, and remain requiring this messy process to encourage migration to Windows 11.

Hook up PowerBI to AzureAD?

Typo in my orginal post... unplug one of the uplinks. TBH I'm just applying basic troubleshooting techniques in the hope something pops up in the logs/behaviour that helps clue you in to the root cause.

Never used an FS switch, and its been a decade since I used a v1910 (the best value switch ever made. IYKYK) I'd be tempted to suggest it might be a) a bug - are the switch's firmware fully up to date? b) just the way LAGG works in this combination of settings c) an artefact of some other services running on the network, perhaps multicast name resolution or some IPV6 thing? Absent any knowledge on the software side... what happens if you unplug on of the uplinks?

So what are actually connected to ports 1/0/5, 1/0/12 and 2/0/14?

Definitely looking forward to this. That said, I am on Twitter a lot (far too much). @6Foot2 being about 1/2 hour ahead of me on B5 news reminds me of those few years when @Arthur did the same but for MS KB / Hotfix / blog articles. I'm think I may just have to give up internetting.

Riffing off this for a moment, I've just had a thought. If you don't have redundant/diverse physical routes in you topology - spend this money on making them with OM4, but lighting them up with 1Gb/s for now. Then next time you refresh your switch infrastructure (in 5+ years) you can pivot over these "redundant" paths to 10Gb and the legacy backbone becomes the 1Gb/s 'backup path'.

We've had a 10Gb backbone for 15 years. It was more important when all our data was on premises. @RobFuller and @Michael Both make excellent points. I would lean towards advising that meeting the DfE spec as the prudent path to follow. However if finances are very tight, and 1Gb has proven more than adequate over the last 10 years, then resiliency and redundancy should be more important than speed of the active kit on the backbone. If one were to draw the physical fibre topology from a logical perspective, we have (in effect) a 10Gb star topology from core to edge and then a 1GB ring between the edge switches and spanning tree keeping it all converged. This topology has saved us many times, and at no point have end users noticed when their link failed over to the 1gb/s ring. One thing 10Gbit does help with is around software deployment, we can be imaging entire IT suites and it doesn't impact the performance of other users. As time marches on our of our internet line (1Gb/s) is approaching 75% average utilisation (over 5 minute periods). I can see us noticeably saturating it within a few years... at which point if we can't get more than 1gb to a switch we might find users reporting performance degradation. If you plan to sweat your active infrastructure significantly beyond 5 years, you would probably regret not having more that 1Gb/s between the core and your switches.

Hope you've got Powershell for Graph SDK version of that script ready to go. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-entra-azure-ad-blog/azure-ad-change-management-simplified/ba-p/2967456

OT but I do wonder how people do this in Google Chromebook land.

Not just servers! After installing 9th May 2023 updates, you will not be able to restore to a bootable state from backups taken before the 9th May update was installed. ...with caveats. Fully applying the update will prevent restoring / booting from older backups. You absolutely have to take the additional steps to have the update protect you from the risk, but you need to be aware that it brings its own risks/problems that need to be managed. Since this update resolves a SecureBoot/EUFI vulnerability, if you have old infrastructure that doesn't have SecureBoot/EUFI this doesn't affect you today... but it will in the future, so I encourage everybody to read the notes! https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5025885-how-to-manage-the-windows-boot-manager-revocations-for-secure-boot-changes-associated-with-cve-2023-24932-41a975df-beb2-40c1-99a3-b3ff139f832d

Picture does indeed look a little different if you filter for Secondary schools: Bromcom: 525 (+10) Arbor: 429 ( +12) The growth in the headline figure is fueled by the primarys going over to Arbor, and looking at the full set, the growth of Bromcom and Arbor is greater than this periods losses by SIMS.

I'm a little surprised we can't filter by type of school. There has tended to be quite a difference in the picture if you are looking at (say) secondary's only. Also I'm not sure how I feel about the Urban Cookie Collective reference. FWIW I set the admin password on our RM NET LM admin account to ivegotthekey. (Old. I feel old.)

64Gb is enough to run as shared chromebook-alikes. Web based apps only, and allow for a reasonable maintenance regime to keep them running. Definitely agree Teams will quickly eat all the diskspace (tbh 256Gb isn't enough if you've got Teams installed on shared machines) If they are going to be 1:1 you can get away with Teams and Office installed (just), but if the use-case allows, go web-app only.

In my experience, the cost in time in setting up and maintaining a 32Gb machine is almost certainly not worth it. It would be massively more cost effective to buy new modern 4gb/64GB devices. However this does require the BM/Finance Director/Head share a business/productivity based perspective on costs. If you do have to go down the route of keeping the 32Gb machines in service, they will either require re-wiping on potentially weekly/daily basis, and there will almost certainly be times when their limitations get in the way of student productivity (i.e. their use will waste lesson/study time) For us, even stripped down carefully, a single windows update would make them unusable, and Edge/Chrome/Teams would also very quickly bring them to their knees.

looking at the code... I wonder if this didn't from from stackexchange, but was actually written by me. lol. anyway, code isn't tricky $ListOfMachines = get-adcomputer -properties * -filter * | where { $_.lastLogonDate -lt (get-date).addmonths(-1) } #Lets export that as an object, so if we need to do anything with this info / restore things later we can. Export-Clixml -InputObject $ListOfMachines -Path .\THISFILENAMESHOULDBEGENERATEDPROGRAMATICALLYSOWEDONTHAVETOEDITITEACHTIME.xml #Now move any machine that hadn't logged on in the above time to a special OU foreach ($machine in $ListOfMachines) {move-adobject $machine -targetpath "OU=BLAH,OU=BLAh,OU=BLAH,DC=school,DC=LocalAuthority,DC=sch,DC=uk"} The -properties * and the export step gives us a huge amount of meta data about the old accounts, so if at some point after we delete them, and then we need to know something (like group membership, SID or SPN) we have a record of it. Also above I suggested password change date, but clearly when I set this up, I decided last logon time was a more appropriate value to filter on.

Disable ones whos password last change date is greater than 3 months. (if its the middle of the academic year, you can tighten this up to those that haven't updated in a month. But better would be to implement processes whereby as a computer is replaced their account is automatically disables and moved to an OU pending deletion at some later time. Imaged devices should re-use their accounts automatically, but if the technician at the console notices it asks for a new name, its old name should be manually archived as above. I think we have a script processing old computer accounts, but fairly sure it came from stackexchange.

We had something similar. After much pestering (EE's network is very much Not My Problem), I eventually gave in and I phoned one of their support line, and some how got escalated to an operative who could see the maintenance schedule and current activity... the conversation went like "yeah we did maintenance on that around the time you saying your site lost signal, but its all signed off as completed, so it can't be that. No. Wait. There's no activity from there at all.... for weeks.... oh yeah that does look like our problem. I've flagged it so it should be fixed in a few days" It was fixed within hours. It had been offline for *months*.

Anyone know the connection between star, superstar and pulsar? I just came across a reference to superstarreport and wondered where it slotted into the history of SIMS.

I know what you mean. But he's mostly a gigging writer on other peoples projects/properties, which is the sort of thing you get quietly dropped from if you are problematic, so I'm hopeful that he's not that secretly toxic alpha type.

We used the pandemic to force the issue. Selected half a dozen teachers who 'got it', workshopped some common scenarios, then delivered training: "tomorrow you'll all be teaching from home, like this. Any questions talk to one of these colleagues, if is is a technical problem, they will escalate to me." Done and done. We haven't looked back. I'd spent years trying to get people to move over, it was agreed that we would, but time and inclination from SLT was never there ("Its too hard/time consuming/confusing etc etc"). The pandemic proved that you can just rip the plaster off and make the change. It was a very similar story 15 years ago when we moved to Kaliedos VLE... the consultant wanted to go in baby steps (because apparently teachers can take change), The DH and myself said, no... all or nothing from day 1. And so it happened and it was good (shame Kaliedos was killed a couple of years later). SharePoint / 365 is very robust. Just make sure you are very familiar with it, bring over some open minded people who are willing to take the ride with you in becoming experts... then go big - everything goes over, the old way is retired - no looking back.

OneDrive files on Demand in conjunction with Seating Plans is another way to solve this. As is a 1:1 programme.

Each Department/Functional Area gets their own SharePoint site (well actually they get a Team, which gives them a distribution list, teams capabilities, a SharePoint site and within that a default Document Library where they will store all their files). SLT get their own Team - The Head's PA owns the file structure. - it is transient - when non-transient work is ready to be shared with a wider audience it moves to a more public site (see Information Site/Intranet below). Middle Management group gets their own team, again managed by the PA to the Head, again transient, but often work exists here for a few years before being cleaned out. HR has a Team, but also Communication Site where they publish to the wider school community Finance has a Team, and a Communication Site. Facilities has a Team and a Communication Site. Safeguarding has a Team and a Communication Site. This Communication Site is mostly a web page directing to the appropriate 3rd party system that securely handle and track safeguarding concerns. Teaching and Learning (a specific role held by a DH) has a team, and an Communication site.... this is where information and policies, guidance around our house T+L style are published. Various special projects also have teams that are stood up and down as appropriate. etc. etc. Some Communication Sites are like little mini-intranets, others are just a Document Library with all staff being having Read Only access. Finally there is a Hub Site we call the intranet... this has links out to all the Communication sites above, and a document library where the Head's PA can drop files that don't quite fit into any of the other categories. This pages and its contents are highly curated by the PA, BM and NM over the summer to reset for the new academic year. As members of SLT change roles, there is some flexing of the above structure.

A custom normal.dot with an embedded macro?

The trick Bedders used there is creating a calculated property, a walk through on how that works/how to parse that is here: https://adamtheautomator.com/powershell-select-object/ Full documentation can be got at the command line: get-help *calculated* or on the web here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_calculated_properties?view=powershell-7.3